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A Postmodernist Of the 1600's Is Back in Fashion

A puckish question was raised on Thursday night at New York University: ''Was Athanasius Kircher the coolest guy ever, or what?'' For those who have no idea who Kircher was, let's begin with the ''or what.''

The German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602-80), a rough contemporary of Descartes and Galileo, was no ordinary man. He studied Egyptian hieroglyphs and helped Bernini with his fountain in the Piazza Navona. He made vomiting machines and eavesdropping statues. He transcribed bird song and wrote a book about musicology (still used today). He taught Nicolas Poussin perspective and made a chamber of mirrors to drive cats crazy. He invented the first slide projector and had himself lowered into the mouth of Mount Vesuvius just as it was supposed to erupt. He proved the impossibility of the Tower of Babel and made a model of how the animals were arranged in Noah's Ark. And he collected the objects that filled the Museo Kircheriano, Rome's first wunderkammer or collection of curiosities.

Kircher's body is buried in Rome. His heart is buried three hours away, at a shrine for St. Eustace (which he founded). And his star is on the rise. There have been recent conferences on Kircher at Stanford University, the University of Chicago and in Rome. There was an exhibition of Kircheriana, put on by David Wilson at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. On Thursday, the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University threw a symposium for Kircher's 400th birthday.

Why the revival? Lawrence Weschler, the head of the institute and the author of ''Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders'' (a book about the Museum of Jurassic Technology), thinks it is because Kircher is the premodern root of postmodern thinking. With his labyrinthine mind, he was Jorge Luis Borges before Borges. In the years before Kircher's death and for 300 years afterward, he was derided as a dilettante and crackpot. The rationalism and specialization of Descartes had taken over. But now Kircher's taste for trivia, deception and wonder is back.

Wonder cabinets have become trendy. The J. Paul Getty Museum recently had a show about wonder cabinets called ''Devices of Wonder'' and the New York Public Library is opening ''A Cabinet of Curiosities'' in two weeks. The Museum of Jurassic Technology, which is itself a modern-day wunderkammer that includes replicas of Kircher's inventions, now has a small but fervent following.

At Thursday's symposium, Kircher's postmodern qualities were evoked: his subversiveness, his celebrity, his technomania and his bizarre eclecticism. ''In an age of polymaths,'' said Anthony Grafton, a professor at Princeton University, ''Kircher was perhaps the most polymathic of them all.'' Like other Jesuits, Kircher was a religious man and a world scholar trying to prove that Aristotle and the Bible were right. He knew Hebrew, Aramaic Coptic, Persian, Latin and Greek. But Kircher was also ''a wild man,'' Mr. Grafton argued. He got away with all-out heresy.

One of Kircher's most daring acts was to write out a long list of Egyptian kings, proving that Egypt existed long before the world was even supposed to have been created. In a dry and sneaky way, Kircher planted the idea that the Bible was wrong. ''Kircher found himself imagining deep time,'' Mr. Grafton said. And that was just the kind of thing that Giordano Bruno, the dogma-hating metaphysician, was executed for.

Somehow Kircher not only survived but continued to tweak authority in the open air of Rome during the Counter-Reformation. He made translations of Egyptian hieroglyphs (later discovered to be completely fanciful). He guided Bernini in erecting an Egyptian obelisk at the Piazza Navona and may even have helped him with the hydraulics for his fountain, which alluded subversively to Kircher's own ideas about the earth's underground rivers.

All that may not sound so radical, but in 17th-century Rome it was an ''in your face'' thing to do, Mr. Grafton said. ''I used to think he was a fool,'' he added. ''And then I stood in the Piazza Navona.''

The folks in Rome weren't the only ones Kircher's magic worked on. He had readers all over the world. Paula Findlen, a professor at Stanford University, says Kircher was a celebrity in his own time, with a crazy fan club that extended all the way to the Americas. Kircher wrote some 60 volumes on astronomy, geology, magnetism, music and philology, in which he cited himself over and over again.

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Kircher's books were the first ''great coffee-table books,'' she said. People bought them to prove they were learned, to show that they were part of the international network of reading and writing. They didn't read so much as look at the pictures. One fan cut Kircher's picture out of a book and meditated on it to calm himself. Another fan kept sending Kircher chocolate in order to remain friends with him. Kircher's most ardent fan, a nun in Mexico City, decided to try to make herself over in the mold of Kircher's favorite goddess, Isis, the mother of gods, the ruler of heaven and earth. She also transformed Kircher's name into a verb. Kircherizing, she declared, is making connections among things.

Could such an astonishing man really have existed? D. Graham Burnett of Princeton University demanded to know why no one in the audience was asking whether Athanasius Kircher, a master of deception, theatrics and play, was himself a fantasy. He got an answer.

Kircher would be nearly impossible to create, said Michael John Gorman, who is making an Internet archive of Kircher's correspondence at Stanford University. If you wanted to make up Kircher's correspondence out of thin air, he suggested, you would have to write thousands of letters on 17th-century paper in suitable inks. The letters would be from 800 correspondents around the world writing in 30 different languages, including the universal language invented by Kircher himself. And who else, Mr. Gorman asked, would think up such crazy machines as an organ driven by a drum that reproduces bird song, a fountain that lifts up a genie, a vomiting lobster, and a statue that pronounces Delphic oracles?

What do these puzzling inventions have in common? Mr. Gorman says Kircher used them to explore and explode boundaries.

Take Kircher's talking statue, which is even trickier than it seems. It has a hidden intercom system. By standing in another room and speaking through a tube connected to the statue, you can make it appear to speak. Or by putting your ear to the tube, you can overhear what the people in the other room with the statue are saying. Kircher, Mr. Gorman said, was playing with ''deception and demonology,'' which was ''no laughing matter in the 17th century.''

Kircher also played on the boundary of decency. He made a magnetic Jesus that would walk on water and embrace an image of Peter. And a startling number of his machines do nothing but wretch and vomit. Kircher was not beyond tormenting animals either. He planned a cat piano. If you struck a single key on this piano, a sharp spike would be driven into a cat's tail, causing it to yowl. By arranging many cats according to the pitch of their yowls, Kircher could make music. He produced a donkey choir on similar principles.

One of Kircher's most cunning inventions was a catoptric box or chamber of mirrors, which could be used in a number of ways. If you put a coin in, you could watch people grab for the illusionary riches. Or if you put a cat in, you could watch it chase the many reflections of itself until it would finally give up in a state of rage and indignation. Kircher, Mr. Gorman said, ''made a spectacle of incivility,'' hoping that ''this theater of passions would reveal true natures.''

The last speaker of the evening was Mr. Wilson, the founder of the Museum of Jurassic Technology. He credited Kircher with inspiring a new kind of museum, one that evokes both wonder and skepticism. But isn't it possible that the ghost of Kircher has seeped out of the museum's walls? Mr. Burnett says Kircher did nothing less than set the terms for a new theory of knowledge, an epistemology based on deception and play. Imagine that kind of approach to science. It is, Mr. Burnett said, ''a liberating way of thinking.'' Or as the postmodern Kirchenistas might put it, ''cool.''

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A version of this article appears in print on May 25, 2002, on Page B00007 of the National edition with the headline: A Postmodernist Of the 1600's Is Back in Fashion. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe